Thread by @studentactivism

When the way you maintain power is by disenfranchising people of color, and your self-interest is in disenfranchising people of color, that's white supremacy. It's literally the definition of white supremacy.

https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1305718231747813377

"White supremacy" has recently come to be used by some to refer to racism in a fairly generic sense, but historically what it referred to, and the way many of us still use it, is a belief in the project of maintaining white POLITICAL supremacy.

There's obviously going to be a lot of overlap between the two, and there's no doubt in my mind that many of Trump's top advisers are, along with Trump himself, racist ideologues.

But you don't need to be a racist ideologue to be a white supremacist. You just need a particular self-interest, and a willingness to follow it where it leads you.

Republicans in Florida aren't fighting to overturn the expressed will of the people of their state on felon disenfranchisement because they care specifically about people with criminal records voting. They're doing it because of the demographics of mass incarceration.

When Republicans in Georgia threw tens of thousands of black voters off the rolls, they weren't doing it because of free-floating racial animus, they were doing it because more black people voting means a steeper hill for them at the polls.

When Republicans in Wisconsin gerrymandered their state to within an inch of its life, shunting voters of color into 90+% Dem districts while spreading their base around as many leaning-GOP districts as they could, they were just indulging their own desire for maintaining power.

We don't need to look into Republicans' hearts to figure out whether they're white supremacists. We just need to look at how they run elections.

Again, there's no shortage of evidence of racism at the highest ranks of the Republican Party, and Trump himself is one of the figures for whom the evidence is most overwhelming.

But the evidence that the modern-day Republican Party is specifically a white supremacist party is empirical and quantitative and utterly straightforward.